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Comment by uiri

Having used TopHat in a couple classes circa 2014-2015, the product is pretty bad. It's main use case is, honestly, attendance. Two anecdotes stick out.

The university subsidizes the cost down to $5. Through some technical error, TopHat applied a full discount. One month later, they noticed their mistake and retroactively charged each student $5. I think I'm the only one who complained to their support enough to get it for free; a lawyer's time isn't worth it and I'm sure they spent more than $5 of support personnel time on it. Charging software engineering students like this is a great way to poison the well for recruitment efforts down the road.

The second anecdote is a guest lecturer, who apparently had questions already set up in the system, was completely and utterly unable to figure out the UI. He abandoned TopHat entirely in favour of a show of hands.

parent uiri 9 years ago

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